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Friday, October 07, 2016

It's All Fine On Kenyan Roads And Why That's A Bad Thing

This week, the Cabinet
Secretary for Transport, James Macharia, unveiled the latest government weapon
in the war to, in the hackneyed words beloved by our media, “bring sanity to
our roads” -instant fines. He gazetted a new list of list of “minor traffic violations”
and the corresponding penalties to be paid on the spot without subjecting the
motorist to the horror that are Kenyan courts.

For many motorists,
any chance to avoid spending interminable hours at the traffic courts for a 30-second
ritual where one gets to either admit guilt and be fined an outrageous amount,
or deny charge and still get to pay a similar amount as bail, is welcome. In
fact, if one was to deliberately design a system to incentivize corruption, it
would be hard to beat the combination of our lumbering court system coupled
with the humongous penalties prescribed by the traffic act.

But it would be a
mistake to take it for granted that the government’s attempt to bypass it is
designed to or will actually either ameliorate the dangers on our roads or
eliminate the opportunities for graft. History teaches us otherwise. This is in
fact not the first time government is using a public uproar over the road
carnage as a pretext to institute a new system of fines.

Four years ago,
following yet another series of nasty accidents, Parliament passed amendments
to the Traffic Act saw a tenfold increase in fines (the very fines the latest
regulations are meant to bypass). The bill was signed into law by then
President Mwai Kibaki in November and within four months, police were hailing it as a “success”.

Nearly a quarter of a
million arrests had been effected and the government had collected half a
billion shillings in fines. The number of deaths on the road, however, had
barely budged. Kenyans continued dying at a rate of 300 per month even as the
state inflated its coffers -such was the definition of success. Perhaps it was
the fact that there were expensive election campaigns to be funded rather than
the deaths on the roads that was at the forefront of our politicians’ minds
when they passed the 2012 amendments. And as another election looms, we cannot
discount the possibility that instant fines are just another money grab.

In a statement laying
out the case for instant fines, the Director-General of the National Transport
and Safety Authority, Francis Meja, noted that one of the challenges the system
would inevitably face was in collection of the fines promising the NTSA would
push for electronic and mobile payment platforms.

His concerns are borne
out by the proceedings of the police vetting exercise conducted by the National
Police Service Commissions. The comical attempts by traffic police officers to
explain away their astounding wealth and numerous MPESA transactions have been
the source of much public merriment and outrage. However, it is unclear how the
instant fines will do much more than cap the bribes which will inevitably be
demanded – with the unintended consequence of making it cheaper for rougue
operators to stay in business. In 2012,
the matatu industry opposed the draconian fines saying they would only result
in higher bribes. It is not difficult to see why they are now supporting the new
system.

The fate that befell
the cashless transit payment system is illustrative. Launched with much fanfare
and backed by the best companies in Kenya, it came a cropper, as ably described
by Ken Griffith in a 2014 piece, at the junction of crews who must pay matatu
owners a fixed amount per day before they get paid and cops under pressure from
superiors to hit their MPESA targets. Thus the crews, who are incentivized to do
as many laps as possible, need to have ready cash to bribe cops and so would
sabotage the cashless system. A similar dynamic was at work when cops insist on
manning city roundabouts already governed by traffic lights.

Because instant fines do little to address the structural and systemic
roots of the bad behavior on the roads, we can safely predict that they will do
little to ease the carnage but will make money for the government. After all,
there’s an election coming, remember?